EshopBox: An eCommerce SaaS Service Dedicated to Fashion Retailers and Brands

Fashion is the fastest growing category in online retail, and is currently second only to electronics in total turnover. A research report ‘Online Fashion Retail Market in India 2015-2019’ by Market Research Reports Inc. forecasts that online fashion retail in India includes the sale of apparel and non-apparel products to grow at a CAGR 64.87% in the next five years. A Google research revealed that every fourth search related to eCommerce pertains to fashion.

What Is Eshopbox

Eshopbox is a startup that is trying to be an end-to-end eCommerce partner for fashion brands and labels. It was started in July 2014 with a mission “to provide unique, customer-centric solutions to fashion brands and labels of all sizes and objectives”.

The company started as consultant to fashion labels to help them sell online by establishing an online presence for many fashion retailers. Over a period they realized that these retailers lost focus on their merchandise as they had to dedicate a lot of resources to manage their eCommerce. The backend operations of these brands could not keep up with managing and stabilizing eCommerce, hence most of them failed to leverage the platform. This is when EshopBox expanded its capabilities by forming a strategic and a technical team to offer several eCommerce solutions for fashion brands to provide customer-centric brand experiences.

What Is Eshopbox Catering To

It offers a combination of products and services to create a single, comprehensive platform to manage all aspects of running a fashion label online, including development of an exclusive webstore, integrating all marketplaces, advertising, marketing and so on. The snapshot below lays emphasis on the eCommerce solutions offered by EshopBox.

Traction and Potential

Eshopbox has shipped over 12500 pieces of products in the month of April 2015. Based on the current client structure and talks to bring on-board more, they estimate to sell around 25000 quantities in the month of May 2015.

It has over 1 Lac items in stock from 22 brands and over 2000 different styles. It already has 48 clients from the Delhi NCR, Jaipur, Ludhiana, and Banaras regions who will go live in the next fashion season.

These solutions are based on contemporary technologies, which is adaptable to suit the brand/label, in order to deliver optimum customer experience. The company is self-funded and possess a strong technical team with a niche business objective, and with more fashion labels, both big and small making a foray into eCommerce, the potential to leverage the demand and grow is boundless.

The company’s goal is to aggressively invest in marketing and technology to broaden its capabilities and to stay relevant to market trends and consumer demands. Presently, it is planning to raise funds for talent acquisition and expansion to other cities.

Market Size and Competition

Fashion being a vast category in India, it was worth $40 billion in 2010, now it is worth $60 billion. The potential is immense as this category is mostly unorganized. Hence, there is a massive opportunity for fashion brands and labels to crop up and take a piece of the pie.

Managing a fashion brand brings with it many challenges, and by leveraging the eCommerce boom in India, this aspect adds more complexity to existing challenges. There is a need for solutions to help and support these brands to run their businesses effectively and efficiently. Hence, firms such as this have some potential in the country.

The competition for EshopBox-like businesses is also immense. There is a long list of SaaS companies that help retailers to go online on their own webstore like Shopify, BuildaBazaar, Kartrocket, Zepo, Powerstores etc. and some even provide integration with the marketplaces. At the same time there are also ERP solutions providers like Unicommerce, Browntape, Vinculum, Primaseller etc. for inventory management and other operational management functions. Looking at the potential of online retail in India, a healthy competition is this area will help in enablement of the same.